An unofficial, eclectic, mostly tangential, view of aspiring devotee life.
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Cows may come, cows may go, but the bull is always here.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Sydney Comes to Visit

Manjari brought Sydney to spend the night. Here she is hangin' with grandma.

Manjari came down to go to a surprise 30th birthday party for Suddha Sattva, son of Soma and Dharmakala. Suddha was a record setting swimmer when he was on the local high school swim team. I think he was the team captain. He got a swimming scholarship to Wheeling Jesuit, which wasn't yet a University when he was there. He works for an environmental cleanup company. He was called to the site of the Flight 93 crash. That was the flight the passengers brought down in Western Pennsylvania on 9/11. Later, he was part of the cleanup at the Capitol after the anthrax scare.

When he was a teenager, he played on a roller hockey team organized by his father and Cakravarti. It was those 2 guys, me and a bunch of teenagers. We played in a Moundsville adult league. We had t-shirts printed up with our name, “Palace Guards”, on them. We lost our first two games badly, and things were looking bleak, but we didn't quit. Then we started to gel, and placed in the top half of the standings for the regular season. In the playoffs, we beat one of the teams that had stomped us early in the season, but lost to the other in the Championship game.

“Prabhupada: ...football? Football ground.Devotee: Soccer.Prabhupada: Soccer or football?Manasvi: Football, that's football. [break]Prabhupada: No, rugby is different.Siddha-svarupa: Football they call soccer here. [break]Prabhupada: ...men in one party?Manasvi: Eleven.Devotee: Did Krsna play that? (laughter)Prabhupada: Hmm? Unless Krsna played, how you can play? [break] ...play is very popular in India, and rugby. What is that called, rugby?Manasvi: No, that is hockey.Prabhupada: Hockey, hockey, yes. [break]

A devotee should not see anything as being separate from the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna. Ether, fire, air, water, earth, the sun and other luminaries, all living beings, the directions, trees and other plants, the rivers and oceans -- whatever a devotee experiences he should consider to be an expansion of Krsna.
Thus seeing everything that exists within creation as the body of the Supreme Lord, Hari, the devotee should offer his sincere respects to the entire expansion of the Lord's body.

Rabindranath Tagore:

A mind all logic
is like a knife all blade.
The hand that uses it will bleed.